Alt­man

out of five tele­vi­sion and into in­de­pen­dent film. MASH, in 1970, put him on the map, and a string of films fol­lowed: al­ways deeply col­lab­o­ra­tive, never false. “I just try to show what I see,” he says in an in­ter­view ex­cerpt. “If it’s ugly, that’s what I see.” Along the way, we learn of his heart trans­plant, his fam­ily life (“For the most part, we were not his pri­or­ity,” notes one of his six chil­dren, not bit­terly but as if stat­ing an ac­cus­tomed fact), his con­stant home movies (sev­eral of which are shown) and his life­long love of cap­tur­ing life with a cam­era. He died while in post-pro­duc­tion of what would have been his 40th fea­ture film; then quite sick, said his wife, but de­ter­mined to keep work­ing. Films, he said, were like sand­cas­tles: You build them with your friends, “then you sit back and watch the tide come in.”